Rewind 6/26- 6/27 The bus from New Orleans to Selma

On June 26th I boarded the bus caravan in New Orleans en route to Biloxi, Mississippi for lunch and then Selma, Alabama for the night.


This is Pamela from One Torch taping signs on the bus.

There were people from different organizations on the bus and one of the intentions was to have conversations about current struggles and ways to move forward through them.

This Ancient African Symbol was part of the icebreaker in the discussion. It signifies 2 alligators that share a common stomach. When one eats, it feeds the other. A nice way to think about nourishing or supporting each other. The energy on the bus was upbeat and playful. Although there were 3 buses in our caravan I was on the best one. I was traveling with a group of talented, playful, intelligent and fun high school students. They brought "Dougie" the puppet with them along with songs, jokes, statements on intention for the Social Forum and great energy.

I met some folks from the Fourth World Movement Organization. It's been a while since I was able to live on about $600.00/month and these wonderful people, Jill, Diana and Diana had me rethinking the question of "how much is enough" in this materialist culture. $600/month is an approximate stipend for them within their organization. The director is paid the same as the other staff and some folks have been working with this organization for over 20 years. Room and board is provided by the organization. If the world was to survive and you could make the difference by figuring out "how much was enough" for you, would you walk away from the rest? Forget the rest of the world for a moment.... Would you do it anyway because your own life would be better by focusing on the most important things? What would it look like?

Lunch was in Biloxi, Mississippi and we heard from several groups working to rebuild from storm damage from Katrina. Possibly Hurricane Rita also, I'm not sure. The damage to New Orleans was vast, but it didn't stop there. We met with a woman from the Coastal Women's Center there, doing fundraising to start a Head Start early education program there.

One thing that is very clear to me on this trip is that people are getting little if any assistance from our government. If anything, the government is allied with developers in trying to further take from the public sector and give it over the private. There is a monumental land grab that is being attempted in New Orleans, trying to take land from people and make lots of money redeveloping it. Also there is a public housing in great condition being taken down in favor of "market housing" that would provide only 30% low income units. New Orleans and other damaged areas illustrate that nothing is going to get better without a continued and coodinated effort to make it better for ourselves. Additionally, the government, which bows down to money over morals isn't there to help, especially if you are poor or a minority.

Arriving in Selma we went to a Black Community school where hate crime vandalism had been perpetrated. An estimated $200,000 dollars of damage was done including the tagging of "Nigger" and other phrases on the walls. Communications wiring was destroyed outside, plumbing was destroyed, cords on vacuum cleaners and copy machines were cut and other malicious acts were done to disable the school. Clearly they were making good progress at challenging white privilege there. Hence the reaction. I was thinking about it that way initially and it helped me deal with what I saw there. Many people remarked that it looked like Katrina had left the mess. Difficult to believe that it was a group of people so hateful and out of touch with their own humanity. Like I said, I was taking a positive view on it, but hearing from a black State Senator at dinner about the continual and direct assaults he deals with from white lawmakers I think that making progress is a daily, direct and exhausting fight here.





Our fried chicken dinner was much appreciated, even more so for breakfast the next day after about 5 hours of sleep the night before.







I have videos from this section of the trip that I hope I'll be able to upload at some point. A glitch in Blogger is preventing me from doing that currently.